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This section was my workspace for philosophy essays between July 2006 and April 2008.
I call this "Prehistoric Kilroy" because it gave me practice for more
disciplined essays in Kilroy Cafe.Also see my philophical blog and Twitter feed.

Issue #2, 8/3/2006

The Problems of Mentoring

By Glenn CampbellFamily Court Philosopher

The single most important source of most
of the world's problems is a lack of parental
resources. Poverty, war, crime, violence
 all of these things ultimately trace to too many
children and insufficient care.

It is easy enough to produce a child. A
single act of indiscretion will take care of that.
It is vastly more difficult to raise a child and
turn him into a balanced and productive human
being.

The vast majority of the children on this planet,
and even in this city, do not have adequate adult
attention. What attention they do get is often
highly defective, from parents who are little more
than immature children themselves. They twist
their children around with contradictory demands,
and the child can never really talk to them.

For almost every child passing through the juvenile
justice system, you can say, "There's a kid who
needs a friend."

He may have friends his own age and legal parents
who provide food and shelter, but he does not have
an older mentor, like a parent should be. These kids
would benefit from any kind of caring
attention from a stable adult.

There is a similar problem for babies in Child Haven.
They are fed and their diapers are changed, but the
are not necessarily given the intensive fondling and talking to
that are required for healthy development.

At the same time that children have a desperate need
for adult attention, there is an enormous waste of
adult resources all around us.

For example, here in Las Vegas, you can walk into
any casino and find hundreds of people wasting their
time, not to mention their money, on useless
pursuits. If only a tiny portion of those adult
resources could be directed toward children, we
would greatly improve our future society.

Of course, it is more complicated that that. For
one thing, casino patrons are IDIOTS. They may be
adults in body, but their brains are tiny little
pea-sized things. The fact that they are engaged
in this sort of activity at all suggests a certain
innate narcissism that may not benefit children
very much.

Still, there are a lot of resources wasted by
otherwise intelligent and sensitive adults. We
all spend a lot of time on things that just aren't
important: watching TV, interior decorating, etc.
We do it because it is easy, and it isn't really
obvious how else we should spend our time.

It would be nice if we could somehow unite all
the wasted adult resources with the desperate
needs of children. Unfortunately, there are many
barriers: social, legal, psychological. You can't
just walk into some defective household and start
playing with the kids. The parents will either
be paranoid and not let you in, or you will soon
be overwhelmed by the needs of that family as they
start to depend on you.

What is needed is some measured form of
interaction with children while preserving
boundaries. Big Brothers/Big Sisters is one
approach. You are assigned to a certain child
who you spend a certain amount of time with,
with the explicit permission of the parent.

Another idea is a program at Child Haven that
invites volunteers to come in and play with the
babies. (We know this program exists, but we know
little about it.)

In the juvenile justice system, service providers
-- such as counselors, PO's and P.D. social
workers -- often become temporary mentors for
children. In the foster care system, CASAs can
often play a similar pseudo-parental role. These
interactions are usually very limited in duration, however, and
they are directed toward a specific goal: getting
the kid off drugs, say, or representing
his wishes in court.

In both juvenile justice and foster care in Las
Vegas, there is no real "mentor" program that I am
aware of  and probably for good reason. It
is hard to establish boundaries on something like
this, and the potential liabilities are huge.

If you decide you are going to be a kid's
"friend", where does it start and end? Every
kids' needs are huge, especially if their parent
is emotionally defective. Caseworkers and service
providers pretty much know where their boundaries
are: You are here here to achieve a concrete goal.
Once that goal is achieved, the relationship will
end. The kid may still need a friend, but you
can't do it outside of your formal role. (For one thing,
you've got plenty of other clients to worry about.)

There are vast underutilized adult resources all
around us  often from adults who probably would
want to help if it was easy for them  and
there are vast childhood needs. For the most
part, the two will probably never get together,
because it is too strategically complicated.

When adults have the parenting urge, they tend
to put a quarter in the machine and produce a
child themselves. It's so easy. That new product
will absorb their resources for the next 20 years, while
the needs of the children already here remain
unaddressed.

I am not sure that the solution to the mentoring
problem is another government or nonprofit
program.

Look at Big Brothers/Big Sisters. They
have boxes all over town where you can deposit
your used goods, which will be sold to raise
funds. Why is such fundraising even
needed? Big Brothers/Big Sisters ought to be
a simple matter of assigning a volunteer to a
child. Why do you need funding for that?

The problem is that any organization of any
kind incurs liabilities. You can't just assign
a volunteer to a child. You have to process
applications from both the volunteer and the
child's family. You have to do a background check
to make sure the volunteer isn't a pedophile.
You have to conduct orientations and monitor the
relationship after it is established. You have
to maintain liability insurance. You have to
have a board of directors. You have to file the
appropriate forms with the government, and you need a staff
to keep track of all your recordkeeping. Then
a building to house the staff.

Most of the fundraising that Big Brothers/Big
Sisters does is essentially paying for
bureaucratic overhead. Any well-meaning
organization is going to fall into this trap.
You can't just say, "I have a good idea."
Once you start involving others in your idea,
you become an "organization" and start down
that slippery slope toward being all organization
and very few good works.

One of the undeniable advantages of biological
parenting is that you bypass all of the liability
issues. You don't need a license and don't have
to prove even the most basic child care
requirements. All you need is sperm and egg.

If all you want to do is mentor a kid who you
aren't related to and don't have an organizational
connection to, it can be difficult, even if the
kid is obviously needy. If one happens to be
male, there is a presumption of pedophilia from
the start. Always, there is paranoia to overcome.
The needier the family is, the greater the social
and psychological barriers tend to be.

If you want to adopt a needy child, the government
gives you an avenue for that. It is a long a
grueling one, and not all adults have the
resources to adopt. The government does not give
you an option for helping a child stay in his home
or cope with his environment. The government has
enough trouble managing its caseworkers. It can't
support volunteers as well.

When you watch kids pass through the juvenile
delinquency courtroom, you see one kid after
another who obviously needs attention. Some of them have
serious enough issues to be formally "treated."
The rest of them are given sanctions and then are
passed back to their usually dysfunctional home
environments. Many of them are very likable,
intelligent and amenable to attention. They just
need your time.

In one sense, the support is incredibly simple:
The kid just needs a reliable adult friend.
In another sense, it is extremely difficult
because of all the invisible barriers between you
and him.

If there is not an organization to address this
problem, maybe there is a philosophy. There is
nothing illegal or improper in an adult
befriending a needy child, without any
organization or authority. You just have to
have a protocol for doing it.

You have to be able to deal with the boundary
issues and the dependency issues. You have to
know where you should and should not intervene.
You have to defend your own needs and interests
and not be absorbed by the needs of others.
Even a CASA or a Big Brother is going to find that
these things are really complicated. If you befriend a
kid, how much of his problems are yours? How
involved do you become in his family? How much of
your own resources are you prepared to spend?

Institutions are comfortable because they give us
nice clear boundaries. You solve the specific
problem in front of you, and that's it. But children
also need something that institutions can't
provide.

It is just like playing with the babies at Child
Haven. It's really simple, yet it's beyond the
realm of organizations. Kids just need attention, without any
goals. They need a friend.

The Mentor Match program was designed by former foster care youth to help with the transition from the foster care system. Prior to being emancipated from the Clark County Division of Family & Youth Services, young adults can be assigned to the Mentor Match program. The mentor will assist the youth in obtaining the following: educational needs, parenting skills if necessary, financial income and training, knowledge of available existing community resources, employment and/or related skill sets, medical assistance and training, establishing harmonious and productive relationships, and help with any other needs and issues that may arise. Training and support are be available to both youth and mentor. Mentors with similar life experiences are preferred.